It’s been a busy old weekend between one thing and another. Plenty happening. I managed to check out a fair amount of stuff, but somehow contrived to overlook most of the event I’d been looking forward to all year. Africa Day.

Damn!

Still, as Padre Pio once remarked to Mother Teresa, You can’t be everywhere!

Of course we never mention Mother Teresa’s reply. I can! Vee old nuns all look ze same!!

I bumped into David Norris, which isn’t something I can say every day. I have bumped into him over the years on Bloomsday, though tho be honest with you, we’ve always done an alternative version, which involved running away from the Joyceans. I once found myself trapped on top of the Martello tower listening to an appalling delivery of plump stately Buck Mulligan by a fellow Limericker and wishing I could simply be exterminated here and now. In many ways, that was the end of my fervent Bloomsday career, though I did manage to collect a fair number of Guinness commemorative glasses over the years, provided you disregard the ones I broke out of inebriation.

Here’s a picture of David at the fruit stall.

And here he is looking a trifle perplexed.

The campaigning can’t be easy, but if it’s any consolation, David will be getting my vote anyway, provided he can manage to secure a nomination. He’s a fine fellow and we need people like him in public office. Besides, I’ll laugh myself sick if the Ancient Order of Hibernians have to invite him as President of Ireland to officiate at the New York St Patrick’s Day parade.

There weren’t too many old nuns at the Munster-Leinster match yesterday, but I can tell you one thing. There was no shortage of sleeveens, gombeens, Nama-candidates, snake-oil salesmen, bunco artists, con-men, chancers and three-card-trick merchants present. And that’s only the lawyers, before we ever get on to the slew of crooked builders and property developers they represent.

Rarely have I seen gathered in one bar such a collection of uneducated, dishonest gobshites as I witnessed yesterday, every one of them with his snout in the trough and enjoying himself, though collectively they have conspired to bring down our country. And every single one of the dishonest, uneducated, uncultured buffoons with an inflated and unwarranted opinion of himself, and his leathery wife (who caught her accent off a sunbed). THankfully, Munster Rugby has produced better things, and how could anyone beat this? Let’s just put the cynicism to one side for a second and say Aaaaaahhhhh!

So let’s forget the builders and the dodgy solicitors. Despite this confederacy of dishonest dunces and puffed-up fools who managed to get a law degree when they used to hand them out with bags of crisps, I managed to enjoy the match very much, and why wouldn’t I? Wasn’t it a great occasion altogether, as Munster reminded our Eastern cousins that taking silverware from Limerick is no easy matter, unless your Daddy happens to be on the board of Nama, yeah?

It’s about shared values and teamwork.

To be fair, now, I think the Leinster players, for the most part, are a fine bunch of lads and why wouldn’t they be, when you consider how many of them have Limerick connections, but sometimes, the supporters can be, how can I put this delicately?

Unaware. Would that be a kind way of putting it?

Can be, I said. Not Are. Not always. Perhaps not even mostly, but when Leinster supporters make arseholes of themselves, they do it with a vengeance. At the last Munster-Leinster clash, a friend of mine happened to remark to his mates that he thought Munster were a little too lateral.

Lateral? came the comment from the three Ross O’Carrol-Kellys behind him. That’s a big word for Limerick. Can you spell it?

Yeah, he said, but can your Daddy spell Nama?

Anyway. Let us not concern ourselves too much with that section of the Leinster support. They’re very much in the minority, even if they happen to be the most vocal. I sat next to a fine fellow yesterday, wearing a blue shirt. He was from Kildare, and when the game ended, we shook hands and wished each other all the best. Later on, I met many decent Leinster people, and I hope they all enjoyed their visit to our city. They deserved their Heineken Cup win, and we deserved our Magners. A fair end to the season.

Apart from the rugby, we had culture in the form of the in_flux art fair.

Very soon now, I’m going to set up a company teaching artists the correct use of punctuation, and I’m going to run a special module for people who run art fairs. Lecture One will be on the Use of the Underscore. Lecture Two will concern The Correct Use of Capitalisation. Lecture Three will be called Do You Write? No? Well Then Stop Fucking With What You Don’t Understand Or I’ll Fucking Kill You All Right???

That all seems fairly reasonable to me.

I’d place underscores in the same category as words like nexus, praxis and zeitgeist.

Guys. Please. Ok?

What else happened?

Oh yeah. Nearly forgot. We all got pissed on Friday night and made highly inappropriate jokes that would have got the whole fucking lot of us fired if we were Guards in Mayo, which, thankfully, we’re not.